Backside Power Delivery Creates Fab Tool, Thermal Dissipation Barriers


Key Takeaways Backside power delivery reduces routing congestion at the most advanced nodes and offers significant performance improvement options. But it also adds a bunch of new challenges involving via alignment and interconnects. Still, leading-edge foundries are making progress, and all of them plan to offer BPDNs at 2nm and below. Backside power delivery networks deliv... » read more

Laser Arrays May Simplify Co-Packaged Optics


Key Takeaways Moving photonic ICs into the same package as silicon helps improve performance, but lasers remain outside. A new monolithic laser array allows hundreds of colors, each individually software-tunable New options are being turned into products, which could help commercialize CPO. The move to co-packaged optics (CPO) holds the promise of putting photonic ICs (PICs)... » read more

Why Indium Oxide Chips Are Getting So Much Attention


Key Takeaways Their low leakage is of interest for memory applications, particularly capacitor-less gain cell designs; They can be deposited over large areas using low-temperature processes, a very desirable characteristic for BEOL integration, and The variety of compositions available gives designers many options to achieve the specific properties they need. Indium tin oxide (ITO), ... » read more

When Cleaning Chips Isn’t Clean Enough


Key Takeaways Contamination is becoming much more difficult to identify at the most advanced nodes, forcing fabs to rethink how control is achieved. Issues may show up as electrical or statistical anomalies, not particles, and not at time zero. Reliable classification is needed to identify critical contamination and reduce time and effort spent on nuisance failures. For much... » read more

Can A Computer Science Student Be Taught To Design Hardware?


Key Takeaways New approaches are being devised and tested to address the talent shortage. Leveraging AI in design tools will help engineers become more efficient, and potentially could reduce the time it takes to train engineering students. EDA companies are looking at whether it's possible to train computer science and software engineers to become hardware engineers. A vari... » read more

The Race Begins For Much Bigger Abstractions In Data Centers


Key Takeaways Data center build-out is enabling much larger and more complex abstractions. Competition is building for digital/virtual twins across multiple industry segments, including automotive, aerospace, and chip manufacturing. AI, and particularly AI agents, will play a significant role in sorting through data to find potential trouble spots. The frenzy of new data cen... » read more

Chiplets And 3D-ICs Add New Electrical And Mechanical Challenges


Key Takeaways • Chiplets and 3D-IC architectures add new thermal-mechanical stresses that can affect the reliability of entire systems. • As chiplets are assembled into packages, defectivity targets become more stringent for each component in a system. • Traditional silos are breaking down, forcing design teams to address issues such as materials choices that previously were handled by... » read more

UCIe’s Major Technical Components Are Now In Place


Key Takeaways UCIe 3.0 doubles bandwidth and enhances manageability, addressing new use cases and following an annual update cycle since 2023. The growing demand for chiplet-based architectures in AI data centers is driven by the limitations of monolithic chips, making inter-chiplet communication and connectivity crucial. While UCIe was initially seen as feature-heavy, many of its ma... » read more

Minimum Energy Per Query


Key Takeaways Extracting heat from a chip faster is a short-term fix to a bigger problem. The longer-term challenge is how to reduce the amount of energy used per query. Data movement, guardbanding, and software inefficiency are key targets for the future. Heat is a serious problem within AI chips, and it is limiting how much processing can be done. The solution is either to... » read more

Catching Critical Defects In TSVs And Stacked Chips


Key Takeaways Variation is becoming a bigger problem in multi-die assemblies with TSVs and hybrid bonding. Multi-modal approaches are required to test these devices. AI plays a role in improving defect capture rate and distinguishing between yield-killing and false positives. New methods for interconnecting devices using through-silicon vias (TSVs) and hybrid bonding in stac... » read more

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